Hope can be found even in troubling times

Midland
Daily News December 19, 2007

On Sunday
December 9 I was riveted to the TV watching “1968 with Tom Brokaw” on the
History Channel. It is so easy to forget parts of history even though I lived
through it. I knew all the events Brokaw talked about but I had forgotten they
all occurred in that year. Brokaw said it was a pivotal year in American
history. Indeed it was.

The United States
was embroiled in the Vietnam War. About 15,000 soldiers were killed in Vietnam
that year, nearly double the number killed in they year before. The total number of American deaths in Iraq don’t total the number
of that one year.

The anti-war protest movement was
growing rapidly.The protestorseven managed to have Eugene McCarthy
as theircandidate in various state
primaries and at the Democratic Convention. The
height of the protest came during the Democratic National Convention with many
angry people outside the convention hall in Chicago in August. Mayor Richard Daley order the police to use force to break up the protestors.
Daly was boosedpublickly
on the convention floor.

In those
days it was fun to watch the conventions of both parties as the nominee was
determined at the convention. We watched with intensity as the various states
cast their votes for their candidate until at the end one was declared a
winner.Nowadays the conventions are a
public show of the pre-selected candidate through state primaries and other
back room manipulation.

There was
much division in our country in 1968 but it was a division that expressed
itself in protests, demonstrations, and being involved in politics. Today the
division is based on being right and people aren’t talking to each other.

Because of the war protests
President Lyndon Johnson made the unprecedented announcement of “not seeking
nor accepting” the Democratic nomination.After Hubert Humphrey became the Democratic candidate he opposed the war
but it was too late to rally the voters around him.

The Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a model of non-violence in his leadership of the
civil rights movement to bring African Americans into the mainstream of
American life. At a speech in Memphis
in April he was assassinated. Despite his non-violent attitude many riots broke
out across the country. One notable exception was Indianapolis where Robert Kennedy spoke to
the African Americans there urging them not to seek revenge but rather
reconciliation. In a rare moment of his own personal journey he said he knew
what it was like to have someone close killed by an assassin. He wasreferring to the
assassination of his brother President John F. Kennedyfive years earlier.

Two months later after narrowly winning the California
Democratic primary Robert Kennedy too was assassinated bringing to a halt the
energy and vision of a man who said , "Some men see things as they are and ask 'Why?' I dream things that
never were and ask, 'Why not?'"

The women’s
liberation movement began in 1968. One woman said on the program they weren’t
ready to call themselves feminists but this was the precursor to that movement.

Thousands
of young Americans migrated to the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco where they experimented in a
new way of life that involved drugs and sex. They were protesting too in their
own sort of way. The movement was highlighted in a song that had these words
“if you are going to San Francisco,
be sure to wear some flowers in your hair …” These people came to be known as
hippies and the flower children.

That year ended with a rather
dramatic hopeful event. In December three astronauts circled the moon and saw
the earth from outer space. It was a triumphant moment in American history that
took its spirit from the vision of John F. Kennedy who declared in 1961 that we
would have an astronaut on the moon by the end of the decade. That actually
happened in 1969.

On a personal level we bought our
first home that year and our daughter Lynn
was born in Augustconveniently between the two national conventions.

Despite the divisions and tragedies
of that year there was national and personal hope. Let’s cling to the hope of
2007 that leaders of vision will rise up to meet the challenges of our times.